


Lasting Memory

by regenderate



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-20
Updated: 2019-03-20
Packaged: 2019-11-26 10:45:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18179582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/regenderate/pseuds/regenderate
Summary: This new regeneration is energetic, curious, fun-loving-- until the others leave, and the Doctor is weighed down by her sadness, her grief, her guilt, her fear. She's doing a good job of hiding it, until Yaz finds her curled up on the console room floor, staring at a video of an old friend.(Sadfic about thirteen's desperate need to process her emotions. Thasmin is very implied but definitely present.)





	Lasting Memory

**Author's Note:**

> WHO'S READY FOR SOME ~~EMOTIONAL CATHARSIS~~

This regeneration was energetic. 

That was maybe one of the first things the Doctor had noticed, after the basic physical checklist-- she had dropped from the sky and immediately started asking questions, grinning, calling the others her friends without a second thought. She had gotten through their first adventure with a frenetic energy she just hadn’t had in her previous body, and for a moment, a shining moment, even amid the pain of rebirth, she had let herself believe that maybe she had finally gotten past everything that had weighed her past few selves down, finally rid herself of the guilt of the Time War and the loneliness of all the years after, and maybe she was finally ready to move forward. 

It wasn’t until everything was over (everything was over and a woman was dead, the Doctor reminded herself, over and over and over, Grace O’Brien had died for them, for her) and the Doctor was walking back to the mechanic shop where they’d found a dead man (nothing the Doctor could’ve done about that one, best to absolve herself of the guilt and move on, worry about the one she could’ve stopped), it wasn’t until then that everything came crashing down, burying the Doctor in sadness and guilt. It was only years and years of dealing with this sort of thing that kept the Doctor walking, step by step, back to the shop, where she immediately started trying to distract herself with mechanics and metaphysics and finding her TARDIS. (It only sort of worked-- she was moving all sluggish, and she couldn’t stop thinking about Grace, splayed on the concrete, and she had warned Grace, said not to come back, and Grace had come back anyway, but it was still sort of the Doctor’s fault, and what if Yaz or Ryan had fallen off that ladder, or Graham had gotten electrocuted, or Kyle from the train had jumped and missed his mark, and those thoughts swirled in her head while she tried to get to know her new sonic screwdriver until the pain and exhaustion of her regeneration hit her and she fell asleep, passed out on the concrete floor.)

The thought of her TARDIS was all that got her through the week or so between that and Grace’s funeral, all that kept her from being crushed completely under the weight of her sadness. The thought that all she had to do was fix up this microwave, calibrate those beams, track down the right coordinates, and she’d see her ship again, be able to sit in the console room and fiddle with bits of the insides and hear the noise of the engines again-- it kept her going, stretched itself over the Doctor’s grief and guilt and worry until she could almost pretend it was all there was.

Grace’s funeral came and went, somehow both easier and harder than the Doctor had expected, and then Yaz insisted on buying her new clothes, and then the Doctor realized she needed help with her contraption to get the TARDIS back anyway, and all of this seemed to happen in the blink of an eye, where she was energetic and friendly again, her sadness pushed so far down that she almost forgot about it. 

There was a brief moment, between pointing the sonic screwdriver and opening her eyes to see the abyss of space, when she felt some kind of weight lift, some kind of freedom. In that moment, she truly believed that when she opened her eyes it’d just be her and the TARDIS, and she could lie on the floor of the console room and just  _ feel _ for a while, the TARDIS humming around her. 

But then she opened her eyes to nothingness. 

And she turned her head to see Ryan, Graham, and Yaz behind her.

And she only had enough time to think,  _ They’re about to die _ , when there was a flash of light, and the next thing she knew she was in a medipod and being energetic again. Or more specifically, annoyed, but who needed specifics? 

She managed to keep up her outward-focused energy for what amounted to a full day walking through a desert planet with a whole big group. The whole time, she was thinking about the TARDIS,  _ her _ TARDIS, that would surround her with warmth and give her what she needed before she knew she needed it, but then when they got to the end the TARDIS  _ wasn’t there _ , and that was… that was the last straw.

She felt the sadness (and fear, and guilt) come crashing back. She didn’t even care that it was in front of the others. The lines between her-with-people and her-without-people were blurring, and they were all going to die on this miserable, miserable desert planet, and her last act was going to be letting down people who trusted her,  _ again _ , and there was nothing more she could do.

She almost cried when she heard the noise of the TARDIS engines.

And again, giddy with relief and excitement, when the TARDIS opened its door for her.

And again when she felt the rush of familiarity walking in, seeing the brilliantly new interior, all fixed up and ready for her. She forgot all of her exhaustion when she watched the others walk in, amazed at what they saw, and then when she got to pilot it for the first time, hopping around, she felt such a sense of  _ belonging _ . She was home, or as close as she could get, anyway.

The engines ground to a halt and the Doctor checked the monitors. They weren’t in Sheffield.

Their second stop wasn’t Sheffield either.

Their third stop was, but it was in 2904.

The fourth wasn’t. 

After the fifth, the Doctor made the executive decision that it was time for a break-- the others were clearly exhausted, and the TARDIS was not cooperating. She got the TARDIS to create bedrooms for everybody and showed them where to go, and then she wandered back to the console room and sprawled across the floor in relief and in defeat. She had a lot to mourn, a lot to atone for, a lot to worry about going forward.

She didn’t know how long she was lying there, but by the time the others were up, she was energetic again, running around the TARDIS console like she was just a friendly miracle worker with a quirky little machine. 

Eighteen stops and one uncomfortable adventure later, they were in Sheffield, and the Doctor could feel the sadness settling in again. It was hitting her that she was about to be alone, without the chatter and support of these three, and she wasn’t sure she could handle it--

Except that she had to handle it, because the ones who traveled with her always,  _ always _ got hurt or died or worse.

Even so. She could feel herself cracking. Her facade breaking down. 

She didn’t know how to describe the feeling that rose in her when Yaz asked her to tea. Elation, maybe. Relief. She hadn’t messed up anything in these one’s lives yet, then, if they still wanted her at tea.

Her frenetic energy came rushing back, and it held through a whole mystery all the way up to the goodbye. She was back in the TARDIS, almost completely given over to her sadness, when the Yaz, Ryan, and Graham walked in and said they wanted to stay. Instantly, the sadness was replaced with worry, and guilt, because they didn’t know what they were getting into and wasn’t it the Doctor’s job as the person with more knowledge to keep them from making this mistake? 

But Yaz was sure, and Graham was sure, and Ryan was sure, and the Doctor felt tears hovering in her eyes as she asked if they wanted to press the lever with her. 

Having them around was going to be good for her, at any rate. Which-- the thought made her feel selfish when she thought about all the ways it might hurt  _ them _ , but-- at the very least, she wasn’t going to be totally alone.

She took them to all the sights, all her favorite places, and a few new ones she’d been dying to try back before she’d literally died. They saw forests, oceans, cities, museums hundreds of years in the future, theater hundreds of years in the past. And the Doctor kept up her energy through it all. To Yaz, Ryan, and Graham, she was an excitable and quirky-but-mysterious maybe-alien with a magic spaceship, and she wanted to keep it that way. It wasn’t hard, really; this regeneration really  _ was  _ energetic, as long as there were other people around and a mystery to solve.

But whenever they went back to the TARDIS and the humans had gone off to their separate corners to sleep, any energy the Doctor had left seemed to dissipate, leaving her alone with nothing but her thoughts, and her thoughts weren’t exactly good company to keep. Sometimes she’d ask the TARDIS to play videos of her old friends on the monitors-- the psychic link meant that she had been able to upload any number of precious moments to be relived again and again and again. Or she’d go underneath the console and bring out some of her boxes, pulling out Amy’s old reading glasses or the shirt Rose had left or one of Donna’s hats and letting herself remember the people who had owned them, their smiles and their laughs and the ways they had walked. She missed her old friends, and she was afraid of letting her new ones down, the way she’d let down Bill or Rory or even River, in the end.

She had hoped that the others would never find out about this side of her. That they would continue to accept her energetic self, taking her hints of a greater sadness in stride.

She shouldn’t have been so naive.

Yaz found her on a particularly bad night-- she had been revisiting her worst moments on the TARDIS wall, people who had died for her, people she had failed to save. The tree lady from the end of the world. Astrid from that replica of the Titanic. River Song, in the library, before the Doctor had even known who she was. Yaz came in at the worst possible moment, with the cold bluish-white of Torchwood on the screen, Rose Tyler saying, “I’m never going to leave you,” and the Doctor curled in on herself almost underneath the TARDIS console, not even crying, just staring, empty, at her memory.

She didn’t hear Yaz come in-- it wasn’t until there were footsteps right next to her and a concerned, “Doctor?” that the Doctor looked up to see a barefoot and pajama-clad Yaz and immediately realized her mistake. 

The TARDIS shut off the video without the Doctor even having to consciously think it. She jumped to her feet.

“Yaz! You’re awake!”

“So are you,” Yaz said. The Doctor couldn’t quite gauge how concerned she was, which was unsettling-- she didn’t want Yaz to worry.

“Yeah, well, I don’t need much sleep,” the Doctor said. “Time Lord and all that.” This was true, but it was also true that the majority of her sleep lately had been on the console room floor, halfway through a happy memory, sometimes with someone else’s clothes in her arms. 

“I sort of figured,” Yaz said. She glanced at where, moments earlier, a larger-than-life Rose Tyler had been projected onto the wall. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Fine,” the Doctor said. “I’m always fine, Yaz. Been two thousand years and I’m still fine.”

Yaz raised her eyebrows, and the Doctor shrugged.

“Some days are harder than others. Well, some decades, really, but decades are short, in the grand scheme of things.” She could feel herself cracking a little. She had to get Yaz out of there. “Really,” she added. “I’m fine.”

“Oh, Doctor,” Yaz said, raw empathy in her voice. She didn’t leave-- in fact, she did quite the opposite. Before the Doctor knew what was happening, Yaz was holding her, and she was holding Yaz back, her head buried in Yaz’s shoulder, trying her absolute hardest not to cry.

“You weren’t supposed to see this,” she mumbled, her voice muffled against Yaz’s flannel pajama shirt. “I’m not supposed to be all sad.”

“You’re just supposed to be who you are,” Yaz said, her voice soft next to the Doctor’s ear. “It’s okay to be sad.” 

The Doctor didn’t answer that, but she didn’t let go, either. There was comfort in hugs-- a comfort she’d forgotten at some point in the last few centuries. She didn’t really feel less sad, but-- maybe she felt less alone.

“Who was she?” Yaz asked. “That woman?”

The Doctor stepped back and glanced at the now-blank TARDIS wall.

“Her name was Rose,” she said. Her voice broke just a little bit. “I can-- I can show you. If you like. Some of the happier memories.”

“Sure,” Yaz said. “It’d do you some good to talk about this sort of thing, you know.”

“Maybe,” the Doctor said. “Don’t really want to bother you lot about it. I’ve got a lot of-- history. And a lot of it isn’t very pretty.”

“We don’t need to know everything,” Yaz said. “Just-- maybe if you’re sad, you could tell us once in a while. That sort of thing.”

“Maybe,” the Doctor said. She turned to the TARDIS console and ran her fingers over a few buttons, mostly for show. When she turned around again, Rose was back on the wall, grinning from the meadow in New New York.

“Can I just say,” the Rose on the screen said, “I love this? Traveling with you? I love it.”

And the Doctor’s old old voice saying, “Me too.”

“Is that you?” Yaz asked. “How long ago did you travel with her?”

“Don’t know, really,” the Doctor said, her eyes fixed on the screen. “Something like a thousand years. Three bodies ago. We were-- we were  _ good _ , together.”

“A thousand years,” Yaz echoed. “You really  _ are _ old.”

“I really am,” the Doctor said. She looked back at the screen. The image shifted to show Martha, clapping in the middle of a crowd at the Globe.

“Who’s that?” Yaz asked.

“Martha Jones,” the Doctor said. “A good friend of mine, way back when. She’s all right, actually, wound up in London, working for UNIT. Died peacefully of old age and all that. Brilliant woman. Wouldn’t call me the Doctor at first because she was in medical school and thought I had to earn it.” The image shifted to Martha, leaning over the Doctor with a stethoscope with curiosity in her eyes.

“Did you?” Yaz asked. “Earn it, I mean.”

“In her eyes,” the Doctor said. She remembered when Martha and Rose and Donna and everyone else had been in the TARDIS together, after they’d defeated the Daleks-- and because she was thinking about it, it came up on the screen, everyone dashing about and laughing together.

“What’s that?” Yaz asked. 

“Suppose it’s sort of my old fam,” the Doctor said. “Everybody together. After we sent the Daleks away. Didn’t last long, you know. They all had lives to get back to. Rose lives in a parallel universe with a human version of me-- long story. That’s him, in the blue suit. And Donna-- that’s Donna, the redhead-- she’d absorbed a bunch of my regeneration energy. Had to erase all her memories of me.”

“No wonder you’re so sad,” Yaz said. “Isn’t there anyone else?”

“Not really,” the Doctor said. “There was a war. This great big Time War. No one really made it out. My whole planet got destroyed.” She paused. “Well, not really, turns out, but it might as well have been. Thought it was. But the Time Lords don’t like me all that much, either way.”

The Doctor felt a hand in hers, fingers tangling together. She looked at Yaz, who was looking at the Doctor with a compassion that the Doctor had seen from her a number of times, but never directed at herself. The Doctor tried to smile back, but she didn’t know if it came across. Instead, she just held eye contact with Yaz, feeling the heat from her hand, a quiet understanding passing between them.

“Let me know if you need anything,” Yaz said. “Anytime. I mean it.”

“Thanks, Yaz,” the Doctor said, knowing she would never dare.

But Yaz didn’t leave, and this time when the Doctor fell asleep, it was with friends onscreen and Yaz right next to her, still holding her hand.

It was still hard, after that. She was still sad. She still hid it. But sometimes she’d say something offhand and Yaz would make eye contact with her, and then later when the others had gone to bed they’d sit in the console room and the Doctor would show Yaz more of her memories, or maybe open her boxes and pull out a scarf or a book or something, and Yaz would tell the Doctor all about her childhood in return. The Doctor still never asked for help, still collapsed a little anytime the others left the room, and on top of that was overpowered with the knowledge and fear that Yaz was a human and humans didn’t last all that long, but despite all that-- she felt a little better. A little less alone.

**Author's Note:**

> anyway follow my tumblr regenderate or my creative blog burclay (where i post about fic stuff!)
> 
> also shoutout to everyone i've ever spoken to in any discord server ever for enabling my fics


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